During the past years Jethro Tull has been touring a lot all over the world promoting their new studio albums and the co-founder, multi-instrumentalist, singer Ian Anderson is the only original member of the group these days. Although he has a lot of experience in live shows, he said in an interview with Classic Album Review (Transcribed by Blabbermouth) that some things still bother him. He talked about some bad audiences he encoutered in Brazil and in the United States.
Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson talks about the bad audiences he encountered in the USA and Brazil
“I wanna be free of feeling that I am in any way having to comply with other people’s wishes and other people’s demands. And the more demanding an audience are, by the way, the less I enjoy it, because there are occasions where sometimes you get a volatile audience due to the cultural tendencies in particular places. I could name Brazil, for example, where audiences think it’s okay to whistle and shout and boo and shout out the names of songs they wanna hear. I mean, I actually find it incredibly rude, and I really don’t enjoy that. It’s not every concert I’ve played in Brazil, but I encountered it a couple of times last year when I was on tour in Brazil, and that’s the way they are.”
“There are other national stereotypes where people do behave that way. You will encounter it sometimes in the USA, where people think it’s okay to shout and whistle. It’s not okay. I’m trying to concentrate on playing sometimes quite difficult music, and I don’t like to be interfered with. I like to have the flexibility to be able to do that. And so if the audience set out to somehow manipulate you or influence your way of playing, that’s not good. For me, it is absolutely sufficient, at the end of a song, to see smiles on faces and somebody applauding at the appropriate time. That means everything to me. I don’t wanna be interrupted while I’m performing.”
He continued:
“I’m not complaining. Things are the way they are. If you’re a performing musician, just as they would be if you were the prime minister at prime minister’s questions — you have to accept that you’re gonna get some bad behavior and some interfering kind of manipulative demands from the backbenchers. It’s the way things are. We have to accept it. But sometimes, as in this case, it becomes a topic of a song, slightly tongue in cheek, and certainly not only applicable to me. It could apply to a ballet dancer or an opera singer or a thespian in the midst of a Shakespearean dramatic play. It happens to all of us. We are controlling, and yet in a funny kind of a way we’re also being controlled by. And in a kind of sadomasochistic way, perhaps we, or at least some of us, might like that. They might like that feeling of having to work within the expectations of an audience and they want to satisfy that, particularly in more popular, big productions.”
“They probably get a little cheesed off if the audience isn’t jumping around and waving their hands in the air and taking selfies and doing whatever. They probably feel they’re being ignored in some way, or it’s not a responsive audience. But since 1969, when I first started playing in theaters in the U.K., I take a different tack. I like a respectful, relative silence until we get to the end of a song. Then it’s time to applaud. And some people might find that difficult to understand or something they don’t particularly like, that I would feel that way, but it’s the way I’ve always been. And the way I am, on the rare occasions I go to a concert, I’m not gonna start whistling and shouting and calling out for songs that I wanna hear. Or booing. What’s the point in doing that? You might as well just leave the venue and get to the pub early,” Ian Anderson said.
Until 2022, the most recent Jethro Tull album was a Christmas themed record released in 2003. 19 years later the band finally made a new studio album, which was “The Zealot Gene” (2022) but then they released “RökFlöte” (2023) and now announced their 24th studio album “Curious Ruminant” which will be out next March 7, 2025.
Besides Anderson, were also part of the record: Andrew Giddings (Keyboards), James Duncan (Drums), David Goodier (Bass), John O’Hara (Keyboards), Scott Hammond (Drums) and Jack Clark (Guitar).
